AGITATED markets, a tumbling pound-sterling, a downgraded credit rating: none of these should have been an unexpected outcome of the British electorate’s decision last weekend to opt out of the European Union.

As for leadership turmoil in the main parties, it was more or less a given that David Cameron’s days as prime minister were numbered if his arguments for remaining in the EU were defeated by the popular verdict. But the concerted move by members of his own shadow cabinet to expel Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition Labour Party was greeted with surprise.

Mahir Ali

It shouldn’t have been. The Daily Telegraph reported 10 days before the vote that “Labour rebels believe they can topple Jeremy Corbyn after the EU referendum in a 24-hour blitz”. The result of the referendum was unclear at the time, and it is reasonably clear that the “24-hour blitz” would have occurred even if the popular verdict had gone the other way.

The bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party was extremely disconcerted by Corbyn’s landslide victory some nine months ago in a leadership contest that, under new rules, for the first time gave each party member an equal say. Corbyn was a backbench maverick in the PLP who frequently voted against New Labour when it was in power under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and his triumph was anathema to the bulk of MPs who saw power primarily as a means of consolidating the Thatcherite agenda that Blair, with minor variations, had so blatantly pursued.

A clear majority of Labour members thought otherwise, though, and Corbyn’s ascendancy drew back into the party a substantial number of those who had abandoned it because they considered it too right-wing.

The PLP’s assault against Corbyn — led, somewhat ironically, by former shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, whose dad, Tony Benn, a close comrade-in-arms of Corbyn was for decades the most coherent and consistent Labour opponent of the EU on the utterly plausible grounds of its depletion of national sovereignty — has ostensibly been based on the Labour leader’s lackadaisical approach to the ‘remain’ argument ahead of the referendum.

In fact, Corbyn, perhaps against his better judgment, campaigned extensively, if not always enthusiastically, in favour of Britain remaining in the EU. Sure, he was disinclined to rave like Boris (Johnson) and Dave. But that’s not his style. And, more importantly, he had qualms about the EU that his intrinsic honesty prevented him from disregarding.

Yesterday, as Cameron headed for a meeting where he would be obliged to face his EU counterparts, Corbyn faced a PLP vote of no-confidence that was expected to overwhelmingly go against him. Whether his position would remain tenable beyond that is open to question, but there is a fair chance that he could rely on a second leadership vote to retain his post. Where would that leave the conspirators, who until the time of writing had failed to come up with either an alternative candidate or a distinct set of policies?

The move to expel Corbyn was greeted with surprise.
Amid the inevitable turmoil among the Conservatives, commonplace logic pointed to Labour unity behind a democratically elected leader on the basis of a platform that challenged from the left the consequences of a Tory catfight between a pair of more or less equally contemptible former Eton classmates.

Labour’s MPs — and many of Corbyn’s most vociferous opponents belong to constituencies that voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU, but are unwilling to accept responsibility for that outcome — were, until the weekend, in a position to make their party electable in the probable event of a snap election. They have now squandered that chance. Were Labour to win power under a re-elected Corbyn, which is not an impossible dream, it would be despite Hilary Benn & co, caterers to the despondent elites.

Meanwhile, Cameron, who has decided to leave activation of Article 50 — which formally begins the process of UK withdrawal from the EU — to his successor, does not intend to step down until October. Not all of Europe empathises with that approach. France, in particular, wants the exit strategy to be put into action right away, whereas Germany has shown signs of greater patience.

Some constitutional lawyers — of whom there is no dearth in Britain, despite its lack of a formal constitution — have indicated that the nation’s parliament is under no obligation to abide by the referendum verdict, so the UK could remain part of the EU. Direct democracy has also come in for some flak — as, more appropriately, have younger voters who largely opposed a Brexit but did not turn out in sufficient numbers to produce a different verdict.

Amid a sharp rise in instances of racism and profound uncertainty in every sphere, including the UK’s integrity, the only thing Britons are clearly blessed with is the ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Joaquín Roy

By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Jun 27 2016 (IPS)

The hopes of many of those who confidently expected the British electorate to vote, by a slender margin, for the country to remain in the EU have been dashed. All that is left to do now is to ponder the causes and background of this regrettable event, and consider its likely consequences, especially for relations with the United States.

In the first place one must point out and – and this is a general criticism of the present British political system – that Prime Minister David Cameron was hugely irresponsible to steer his country into this risky adventure. It has resulted in the worst calamity to befall Britain in the last half century and has inflicted severe damage not only on the EU but also on all the countries of the North Atlantic rim.

Cameron went out on a limb, thinking to secure total control over the country for his Conservative Party for the next several years. Next he pursued a surrealist referendum campaign agenda, seeking to persuade the public to vote to remain in the EU, against the Brexit proposal that he himself had engineered. He relied on the advantages and special privileges promised to the UK by the EU if the British people voted to remain.

Brussels had already warned that the EU would not grant Britain any further concessions or benefits over and above the conditions that apply in common to all EU members. It pointed out that Britain was in fact already a privileged partner, having opted out of the common currency (the euro) under a special agreement that did not even fix a timescale for its putative future membership of the euro area.

London also retains full control of Britain’s borders, having declined to sign the innovative Schengen Agreement which abolished many internal borders and introduced passport-free movement across the 26 Schengen countries.

The EU has indeed done everything in its power to keep the UK government and people happy and flaunting their prized British exceptionalism.

And now the fateful moment is at hand. The effect on Europe has been devastating. The one possible advantage for the EU – which has discreetly remained unvoiced – is that of ridding itself of an awkward partner, a dinner guest with an unfortunate habit of drawing attention to itself in negative ways. Britain slammed the brakes on progress towards fuller European integration and was a temptation to other recalcitrant EU countries to follow its bad example.

Recently concerns were raised in Washington over the Brexit referendum.

President Barack Obama himself did his best to urge Britons to stick with the EU when he visited London in April.

Cameron, and the people who voted for the UK to leave the EU, have done Obama a disservice. Britain’s image in the United States will deteriorate to unprecedented depths. The vaunted special relationship between the U.S. and Britain will no longer be an effective force underpinning one of the strongest alliances in recent history.

The first victim of the debacle may be the approval process for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, which is already looking shaky, at least for the immediate future.

The TTIP was meant to replicate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious deal to cut trade barriers, set labour and environmental standards and protect corporate intellectual property. The TPP was signed in principle by twelve Pacific Rim countries including the United States, and now awaits approval by legislators in each of the countries.

The rise of populism and anti-free trade sentiment is reflected in speeches by both U.S. presidential candidates, and is likely to slow down what is now viewed as “excessive globalisation”. There is a return to a style of nationalism that exerts control over economic as well as political initiatives.

The next U.S. president will find it difficult to advance their country’s alliance with London on defence issues. The UK will have freed itself from what was already problematic military cooperation with Europe, and only its link with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will endure. Some European NATO partners will be cautious about developing joint operations with a fellow member they view as uncommitted to agreements within the EU.

In the matter of trade per se, Washington will not take kindly to the new position of the City of London once it has lost its enviable status as a financial hub embedded in the EU. Siren songs from other European capitals solidly anchored in the soon-to-be expanded European community will be hard to resist, especially if European leaders adopt policies to strengthen the euro zone.

In Latin America, Brexit will be read as a confirmation that supranational practices and thoroughgoing integration are no longer a priority for the UK. The referendum result sends the message that national sovereignty is now paramount. All the time and effort the EU has spent over the years to promote the advantages of the European model of integration, based on the strength of its treaties and the effectiveness of its institutions, will be regretted as a sheer waste of time and energy.

An alternative “model of integration” based on the U.S. agenda, favouring one-off arrangements or treaties limited in scope exclusively to trade issues, will prevail over the already weakened European model.

The Caribbean region has strong historical and cultural ties to Britain. It will suffer from a less secure bond with the UK and will incline more closely to Washington.

The continent of the Americas, which is closest to Britain from the point of view of history and culture as well as in political and economic terms, will thus find itself further apart from Europe than before.

Joaquin Roy is Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the European Union Centre at  the University of Miami.  jroy@Miami.edu

Translated by Valerie Dee

Excerpt:

With little fanfare, the German IFO Institute for Economic Research recently published a report on population projections for Germany which states simply that the country’s population is shrinking fast.

The country has lost 1.5 million inhabitants since the last census in 2011 and it is estimated that it will have fallen from the 82.5 million in 2003 to 66 million in 2060, when Great Britain (if it still exists as such), will be the most populated country in Europe.

Roberto Savio

Meanwhile, a European Commission Population Policy Acceptance study found that 23 percent of German males thought that “zero” was the ideal family size, and this despite the 243 billion euros that the government spends each year in family subsidies.

The IFO report also states that, without immigrant families, the number of newly-born children would only reach 400,000 in a country of 82 million, and that even if German couples were to start having children again, it would take two decades to have citizens contributing to the social system.

It concludes that a decline in income and productivity because of the aging population is a serious concern for everybody for the near future.

This is happening in the European country which has most immigrants – close to 10 million.  Last year, Germany accepted almost 700,000 immigrants, placing itself after United States in terms of numbers. Nevertheless, even with that “open” policy, its population is destined to a massive decline.

“Instead of opposing populist parties with a campaign of facts, European governments try to neutralise them by incorporating their requests”
At European level, we see the same chilling trend. According to population projections from Eurostat, the official statistical agency of the European Union, the projected values for Europe’s population “are unprecedented in any human population.”

It says that “whereas in 1960 there were on average about three youngsters (aged 0-14 years) for every elderly person (aged 65 or over), by 2060 there may be more than two elderly people for each youngster: in other words, more grandparents for fewer grandchildren than in the past.”

Let us add to all this a Migration Policy Debate paper issued in 2014 by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which states that ”contrary to widespread public belief, low-educated immigrants have a better fiscal position – the difference between their contributions and the benefits they receive – than their native born peers.”

“Where immigrants have a less favourable fiscal position, this is not driven by a greater dependence on social benefits, but rather by the fact they often have lower wages and thus tend to contribute less … Efforts to better integrate immigrants should be seen as an investment rather than a cost.”

Finally, the U.K. government has declared that, although migrants make up only eight percent of the population, they contribute 10 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and that the economic growth rate of the United Kingdom would be some 0.5 percent lower for the next two years if net immigration were to cease.

Now, what is impressive is that those data remain for the specialists even though they have vital political implications. No newspaper has been publishing them and no parliamentarian – let alone government – has used them.

This simply because we now have anti-immigration (and usually right-wing and anti-euro) political parties which have sprung up in every European country, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, and this argument is now taboo.

The fact that the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) considers that Europe will no longer be competitive in just a few decades, because its aging population will not be competitive and a major burden on the social system, unless it opens the door to at least 10 million people, is totally ignored.

Instead of opposing populist parties with a campaign of facts, European governments try to neutralise them by incorporating their requests. After the anti-immigrant and anti-euro U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) took four million votes in May’s general elections, Prime Minister David Cameron has embarked on a campaign among European colleagues to demand that he be allowed to expel European immigrants if they do not find a job within six months and, among others, cancel their rights to social benefits.

This is a brilliant example of the difference between a statesman and a politician. A statesman does what is good for his country, even if that costs him dear.

When German Chancellor Helmut Khol was in favour of European integration and the euro, he had to face very hostile public opinion. For the Germans, the Deutsche mark was a symbol of stability and trust, and the idea of a new currency shared with other less responsible people revived memories of the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, Europeans were suspicious of German intentions.

Kohl decided to accept a non-German, Wim Duisenberg of the Netherlands, as the first governor of the European Central Bank to make the Euro possible.

Today, the existence of Pegida, a German far right anti-Islam political organisation which boasts a few thousand members at most, is enough to paralyse Chancellor Angela Merkel, a politician. She has voiced her opposition to the quota proposed by the European Union for sharing the load of immigrants entering Europe via the Mediterranean.

Her position has immediately been shared by France, with the United Kingdom and Denmark asking to be left out, and several Eastern and Central Europe countries agitating against immigrants … even though they are the countries which provide the bulk of internal immigrants in Europe!

So, we have the data, the projections, and the hard fact that Europe is heading for decline unless it changes policy and acts to increase its population. And, speaking of projections, in the meantime the population of Africa is expected to double.

When will the European political class wake up and realise that time is passing? (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 19 2015 (IPS)

The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of seats it now holds in Parliament (24 seats less than the previous 256).

Roberto Savio

If the proportional rather than uninominal system had been used, the Conservative Party with its 11 million votes would have won 256 and not 331 seats in Parliament (far short of the absolute majority of 326 needed to govern), while at the other extreme the United Kingdom Independence Party with nearly four million votes would have landed 83 and not just the one seat it ended up with – results that would be hard to imagine anywhere else and a good example of insularity.

To an extent, the recent British general elections mirrored the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 when Democratic candidate Al Gore won around half a million more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush but failed to win the majority of electoral college votes on which the U.S. system is based. The outcome was eight years of George W.  Bush administration, the war in Iraq, the crisis of multilateralism, and all the paraphernalia of “America’s exceptional destiny”.

Let us venture now into an analysis that will have the politologues among us cringing.“The left has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 … it has had no real answer to the crisis”

It is now generally recognised that the end of the Soviet Union has given free way to a kind of capitalism without control, marked by an unprecedented supremacy of finance which, in terms of volume of investments, overwhelmingly exceeds the real or productive economy.

In its wake, neoliberal thinking has found the left totally unprepared, because part of its function had been to provide a democratic alternative to Communism, which was suddenly no longer a threat.

The left therefore has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 (with its bail-out cost so far of over four trillion dollars), it has had no real answer to the crisis.

Ever since the industrial revolution, the identity of the left had been to press for social justice, equality of opportunities and redistribution, while the right placed the emphasis on individual efforts, less role for the state and success as motivation.

Continuing with this brutal simplification, we have to add that the left, from Marx to Keynes, always studied how to create economic growth and redistribution – Marx by abolishing private property, social democrats through just taxation.

But it never studied the creation of a progressive agenda in the event case of an economic crisis such as the one we are now facing, with structural unemployment, young people obliged  to accept any kind of contract, new technologies which are making the concept of classes disappear, and rendering trade unions – erstwhile powerful actors for social justice – irrelevant.

It is unprecedented that the top 25 hedge fund managers received a reward in 2014 of 11.62 billion dollars, yet neither U.S. President Barack Obama nor Ed Miliband, then still leader of the Labour Party at the recent British general elections (until he resigned after election defeat), saw it fit to denounce this obscene level of greed.

Meanwhile, Europe as a political project is clearly in disarray, and now faces a “Grexit” on its southern flank and a “Brexit” on its northern flank.

In the case of a “Grexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Greece), Greece faces the prospects of having to make substantial concessions to Europe, thus reneging on the promises of Alexis Tsipras who was voted in as prime minister in rebellion against years of dismantlement of public and social structures imposed in the name of austerity.

What is at stake here is the very neoliberal model itself and not only is ordoliberal Germany supported by allies like Austria, Finland and the Netherlands erecting a wall against any form of leniency, but countries which accepted painful cuts and where conservatives are now in power, like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, see leniency as giving in to the left.

A “Brexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Britain) is a different affair. It is a game being played by British Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate a more favourable agreement for Britain with the European Union.

A referendum will be held before the end of 2017 and the four million people who voted for the UKIP in the recent elections, plus the country’s “Euro-sceptics”, threaten to push Britain out of the European Union, especially if Cameron does not manage to obtain some substantial concessions from Brussels.

Meanwhile, if Europe is in disarray, the United States has a serious problem of governance. Analyst Moisés Naím, who served as editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine from 1996 to 2010, has pinpointed a few examples of how this has translated into self-inflicted damage.

One concerns China which, after waiting five years trying to get the Republican-dominated Congress to authorise and increase in its stake in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from a ridiculous 3.8 percent to 6 percent (compared with the 16.5 percent of the United States), got fed up and established an alternative fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Washington tried unsuccessfully to kill the initiative by putting pressure on its allies but first the United Kingdom, then Italy, Germany and France announced their participation in the new bank, which now has 50 member countries and the United States is not one of them.

Another example was the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to kill the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) which has provided support for U.S exporters to the tune of 570 billion dollars since it was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.  In just the last two years, China has provided 670 billion dollars in support for its exporters. Moral of the story: U.S. companies will be at a clear disadvantage.

As Larry Summers, a great proponent of U.S. hegemony, put it, “the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system”.

The latest snub to the U.S. role of world leader came from four Arab heads of state who snubbed a U.S.-Gulf States summit at Camp David on May 14. The summit had been called by Obama to reassure the Gulf states that the ongoing negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement would not diminish their relevance, but the rulers of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain deserted the summit.

However, there is no more striking example of mistake-making than the joint effort by the United States and Europe to push Russian President Vladimir against the wall over his engagement in Ukraine by imposing heavy sanctions.

There was no apparent reflection on the wisdom of encircling a paranoid and autocratic leader, albeit one with strong popular support, by progressively also bringing in all Eastern and Central European countries. The result of this encirclement of Russia is that China has now come to the rescue of Russia, by injecting money into the country’s asphyxiated economy.

China will invest around six billion dollars in the construction of a high speed railway between Moscow and Kazan, is financing a 2,700 kilometre pipeline for the supply of 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas over a period of 30 years, plus several other projects, including the establishment of a two billion dollar common fund for investments and a loan of 860 million dollars to the Russian Sberbank bank.

So, the net result is that Russia has been pushed out of Europe and into the arms of China, and the two are now starting joint naval and military manoeuvres.  Is this in the interest of Europe?

At the end of the day, the decline of Europe and the United States perhaps comes down to a decline of political vision, with democracy being substituted by partocracy, and the statesman of yesteryear being substituted by very much more modest and self-referential political leaders.

This is all taking place amid a growing disaffection with politics, which is now aimed basically at administrative choices, making corruption easy. At least this is what around one-third of electors now appear to believe when they are asked if they think that they can make a difference at elections … and this is why a rapidly growing number of people are deserting the ballot box. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 4 2015 (IPS)

The ‘West’ is a concept that flourished during the Cold War. Then it was West against East in the form of the Soviet empire. The East was evil against which all democratic countries – read West – were called on to fight.

I recall meeting Elliot Abrams, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State during the Ronald Reagan administration, in 1982. He told me that at the point in history, the real West was the United States, with Europe a wavering ally, not really ready to go up to the point of entering into war with the  Soviet Union.

Roberto Savio

When I tried to explain to him that the East-West denomination dated back to Roman times, long before the United States even existed, he brushed this aside, saying that the contemporary concept was that of those standing against the Soviet Empire, and the United States was the only power willing to do so.

The Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington. The fact that United States had a manifest destiny and was therefore a spokesperson for humankind and the idea that God was American were the bases of his rhetoric.

In one famous declaration, he went so far as asserting that United States was the only democratic country in the world.

After the end of the Cold War, President George W. Bush took up the Reagan rhetoric again. He declared that he was president because of God, which justified his intervention in Iraq, albeit based on false data about weapons of mass destruction (Abrams was also by his side). Now it turns out that he has an indirect responsibility for the creation of the Islamic State (IS).“The [Ronald] Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington”

All this starts in Iraq.  The first governor at the end of the U.S. invasion was retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner who did not last very long because his ideas about how to reconstruct Iraq were considered too lenient. He was replaced by U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer.

Bremer took two fateful decisions: to eliminate the Iraqi army, and to purge all those who were members of the Baath party from the administration, because they were connected to Saddam Hussein. This left thousands of disgruntled officers and a very inefficient administration.

Now we have learned that the mind behind the creation of IS was a former Iraqi colonel from the secret services of the Iraqi Air Force, Samir Abed Al-Kliifawi. The details of how he planned the takeover over of a part of Iraq (and Syria), have been published by Der Spiegel, which came to have access to documents found after his death. They reveal an organisation which is externally fanatic but internally cold and calculating.

After the invasion of Iraq, he was imprisoned by the Americans, and there he connected with several other imprisoned Iraq officers, all of them Sunnis, and started planning the creation of the Islamic State, which now has a number of former Iraqi army officers in its ranks. Without Bremer’s fateful decision, Al-Kliifawi would probably have continued in the Iraqi army.

What we also have to remember here is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was rendered useless by the Cold War, and many saw its demise. However, it was given the war against Serbia as a new reason for existence, and the concept of the West, embodied in a military alliance, was kept alive.

According to a report by scholars with the ‘Costs of War’ project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the terrible cost of the Iraqi invasion had been 2.2 trillion dollars by 2013, not to speak of 190,000 deaths. If we add Afghanistan, we reach the staggering amount of 4 trillion dollars – compared with the annual 6.4 trillion dollar total budget of all 28 members of the European Union – for “resolution” of the conflict.

One would have thought that after that experience, Europe would have desisted from invading Arab countries and aggravating its difficult internal financial balance sheet. Yet, Europe engaged in the destabilisation of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, leading to the explosion of Jihadists from there, 220,000 deaths and five million refugees.

In the case of Libya, under the prodding of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and the United Kingdom’s David Cameron, both for electoral reasons, Europe entered with the aim of eliminating Mu’ammar Gheddafi, then leaving  the country to its destiny. Now thousands of migrants are using Libya in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe and Cameron has decided to ignore any joint European action.

For some reason, Europe always follows United States, without further thinking. The case of Ukraine is the last of those bouts of somnambulism. It has invited Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO, prodding a paranoiac Putin (with the nearly unanimous support of his people), to act to finally stop the ongoing encirclement of the former Soviet republic.

The problem is that Europeans are largely ignorant of the Arab world. A few days ago, Italian police dismantled a Jihadist ring in Bergamo, a town in northern Italy, arresting among others an imam, or preacher, No Italian media took the pain to ascertain which version of Islam he was preaching. All spoke of an Islamic threat, with attacks being planned on the Vatican.

If they had looked with more care, they would have found out that he preached the Wahhabi version of Islam, which is the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia, and which consider all other Muslims as apostates and infidels. This is very similar to IS, which has adopted its Wahhabi version of Islam, but is a far cry from equating Wahhabism with terrorism – all terrorists may be Wahhabis but not all Wahhabis are terrorists.

Saudi Arabia has already spent 87 billion dollars in promoting Wahhabism, has paid for the creation of 1,500 mosques, all staffed with Wahhabi imams, and continues to spend around three billion dollars a year to finance Jihadist groups in Syria, along with the other Gulf countries. This has made Assad an obliged target for the West, and he has succeeded in his claim: better me than chaos, a chaos that he has been also fomenting.

Now the debate is what to do in Libya and NATO is considering several military options. The stroke of luck this time is that U.S. President Barack Obama does not want to intervene. However, with the 28 countries of the European Union increasingly reclaiming their national sovereignty and seldom agreeing on anything, a military intervention is still in the air.

Meanwhile, thousands of refugees try crossing the Mediterranean every day (with the known number of deaths standing at over 20,000 people) to reach Europe, thus strengthening support for Europe’s xenophobic parties which are exploiting popular fear and rejection.

It is a pity that, according to United Nations projections, Europe needs at least an additional 20 million people to continue to be competitive … but this is politically impossible. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 25 2015 (IPS)

The United Kingdom has been accused of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis – and the accusation comes from no less than the House of Lords, not usually considered a place of critical analysis.

In a scathing report, the upper house of the U.K. parliament has said that the United Kingdom, like the rest of the European Union, has sleepwalked into a very complex problem without looking into the possible consequences, letting bureaucrats taking critical political decisions.

Roberto Savio

It said that it was only when the conflict was well entrenched that political leaders decided to negotiate the Minsk ceasefire agreement, reached by Angela Merkel of Germany, Francois Hollande of France, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, with the notable absence of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

In fact, it was left up to bureaucrats of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to take decisions regarding Ukraine, the same kind of bureaucrats as those appointed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission who, with their usual arrogance, decided the European bailout conceded to Greece where it is widely known that the priority was to refund European (especially German) banks.

The media have a great responsibility in this situation. In all latter day conflicts, from Kosovo to Libya, the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that. Let us be to the point and crisp.“The media have a great responsibility … the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that”

The latest example. All media have been talking of the Iraqi army engaged in taking back the town of Kirkuk from the Caliphate, the Islamic State. But how many are also informing that two-thirds of the Iraqi army is actually made up of soldiers from Iran? And that the Americans engaged in overseeing this offensive are in fact accepting cooperation from Iran, formally an archenemy?

How many have been reporting that the ongoing negotiations over the nuclear capabilities of Iran are really based on the need to restore legitimacy to Iran, because it has become clear that without Iran there is no way to solve Arab conflicts? And how many have informed that all radical Muslims have received financial support from  Saudi  Arabia, which is intent on supporting Salafism, the Muslim school which is at the basis of al-Qaeda and now of the Islamic State?

Recent history shows the West has gone into a number of conflicts (Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012), without looking beyond the immediate consequences, and without any consideration for long-term analysis. The costs of those conflicts have always exceeded the benefits foreseen. An auditor company could not certify any of those conflicts in terms of costs and benefit.

Let us start from the collapse of Yugoslavia, and let us remind ourselves that the West has three principles of international law under which to shield itself as a result of its actions.

One is the principle of inviolability of state borders, which was not applied to Serbia, but is now the case for Ukraine. The second is the principle of self-determination of people, which was used in Kosovo for the Albanian minority living in that part of Serbia but it is not considered valid now for the Russian populations of East Ukraine. The third is the right to intervene for humanitarian interventions, which was used first in Libya, and is now under consideration for Syria.

The drama of the Balkan conflicts was due to a very unilateral action by Germany, which decided to extrapolate Croatia and Slovenia from the Yugoslav federation as its zone of economic interest. The then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, pushed this in an unprecedented way throughout the West.

It was the first time that Germany had play an assertive role, with U.S. support, and it was a Cold War reflex – let us eliminate the only country left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which still inspires itself to a socialist state and not to a market economy.

Serbia, which considered itself heir to the Kingdom of Serbia (out of which Josep Broz Tito had created the socialist Yugoslavia), intervened and a terrible conflict ensued, with civilians paying a dramatic cost.

That conflict renewed dormant ethnic and religious divisions, about which everybody knew, but Genscher, who was then no longer in the German government, explained at a meeting in which the author participated: “I never thought the Serbians would resist Europe.”

It is interesting to note in this context that just a few weeks ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that neither Serbia nor Croatia had engaged in a genocidal war. The news was reported by many media, but without a word of contextualisation.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been destroyed to implement the winning theory of “free market against socialism”. Did the creation of five mini-states improve the lives of the people? Not according to statistics, especially of youth unemployment, which was unknown in the days of Tito.

Then there was Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack in September 2001, the rationale for attacking the country was based on assertions that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was both harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, the group held responsible for the attack, and possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to the United States and its allies. These, which turned out to be lies, were blindly propagated by the media

But if, as is widely believed, petroleum was the cause, let us look at figures as an accounting company would do. That war is estimated to have cost at least two trillion dollars, without considering human life and physical destruction.

Iraq’s annual petroleum output at full pre-war capacity was 3.7 million barrels per day. Now a part of that is under the control of the Islamic State and Kurds have taken more than one-third under their control. But even at the full production, it would have taken more than 20 years to recoup the costs of the war.

It is, to say the least, unlikely that the United States would have had all that time – and since the war, has spent more than a further trillion dollars just in occupation and military costs.

And what about Afghanistan where there is no petroleum? Two trillion dollars have also been spent there … and the aim of that war was just to capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden!

Among others, it was said that democracy would be brought to Afghanistan. Now, after more than 50.000 deaths, nobody speaks any longer of institutional building, and the United States and its allies are simply trying to extricate themselves from a country whose future is bleak.

Now, the question I want to raise here is the following: what has happened to looking beyond the immediate consequences and long-term analysis in foreign policy?

Is it possible that nobody in power questioned the wisdom of an intervention in Libya for example, even assuming that Muammar Gaddafi was a villain to remove?  Did any of them ask what would happen afterwards? Did any of those in power ask what it would mean to support a war to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and what would happen after?

It appears that the House of Lords is right, we are taken into conflict by sleepwalkers. The West is responsible either for creating countries which are not viable (Kosovo), or for disintegrating countries (Yugoslavia and now probably Iraq), or for opening up areas of instability (Libya, Syria).

Without mentioning Ukraine where intervention is aimed at pushing the country towards Europe and NATO, thus provoking the potential retaliation of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Those errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and, altogether, cost at least seven trillion dollars. Who is going to wake the sleepwalkers up? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

For a long time, citizens of the United States have firmly believed that their country has an exceptional destiny, and continue to do so today even though their political system has become totally dysfunctional.

The three pillars of U.S. democracy – legislative, executive and judicial – are no longer on speaking terms,  so dialogue or the possibility of bipartisan policy has virtually disappeared.

In this context, to please his opponents, and with a view to the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, President Barack Obama is increasingly being pushed to act as strong guy.

Roberto Savio

This is the only reasonable explanation on why he has suddenly declared Venezuela a security threat to the United States, just months after starting the process of normalisation of relations with Cuba, a long-time U.S. enemy in Latin America and ally of Venezuela.

The country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, is extremely happy because his denunciations of a U.S. plot with Venezuela’s opposition to have him removed have now been officially justified – by no less than the United States itself. Even the New York Times, in an editorial on Mar. 12, wondered about the wisdom of such move.

The problem is that, behind Obama’s back, U.S. Republican senators are doing unprecedented things, like writing an admonitory letter to the Supreme Guardian of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicating that any nuclear agreement made with Obama would last only as long as he remained in office.

That letter must have made Khamenei and Iran’s hardliners very happy, because they have always said that the United States cannot be trusted, and that the ongoing nuclear negotiations make no sense."This escalation [over Ukraine] has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point? "

We are now facing an extension of the concept of the exceptional destiny of the United States, in which its foreign policy can also be exceptional, not subject to logic and rules.

Across the Atlantic, what is certainly exceptional is that while Europe has practically always followed U.S. foreign policy, even when it is against its interests as is the case of the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the United Kingdom – which has a special relationship with the United States – is now indulging in some divergent action.

Through its Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, the United Kingdom has announced that it intends to join the Chinese initiative for the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in which Beijing is investing 50 billion dollars. This has raised the ire of the United States because the AIIB is seen as an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, in which the United States (and Japan) have powerful interests.

Shortly after Cameron’s move, France, Germany and Italy followed, while Australia will also join and South Korea will have to do so. This will leave the United States isolated, opening up a new “exceptional” dimension – economic might (China) is more attractive than military might (United States).

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to U.S. irritation by declaring that the United Kingdom is joining the AIIB because “we think that it’s in the UK’s national interest”.

Of course, Cameron is playing up to his financial constituency, which is very aware of its interest, even when it does not coincide with U.S. interest. After all, China’s share of global manufacturing output, which was three percent in 1990, had risen to nearly 25 percent by 2014.

Even worse is that Cameron has also decided to cut spending on defence and while the U.K. government currently meets the two percent of GDP target that the United States expects all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to pay into the alliance, it has only committed itself to continuing that until the end of the current Parliament in May.

For the U.S. administration, this could be taken as a sign of weakness by Russian President Vladimir Putin who, it argues, should be put under growing pressure and shown that the confrontation over Ukraine will escalate until he backs down.

This escalation has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point?

The signals are those that precede a war.

U.K. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has declared that Russia is “as great a threat to Europe as ‘Islamic States’.” Troops are amassing in the Baltic States to serve as a deterrent for a possible Russian invasion. The U.S. Republican Congress is overtly asking for the supply of massive and heavy weapons to the Ukrainian army.  Hundreds of U.S. troops have been assigned to Ukraine to bolster the Kiev regime against Russian-backed rebels in the east. The United Kingdom is sending 75 military advisers.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Polish government is supporting the creation and training of militias, and plans to provide military training to any of the many Poles who are increasingly concerned that “the great Russian behemoth will not be sated with Ukraine and will reach out once again into the West.” The same is happening in the Baltic States, which all have a sizable Russian presence and think Putin could invade them at any moment.

Media everywhere have engaged in a frenzy of personal vilification of Putin and in the popular pastime of using Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism – to advocate tit for tat what Putin is doing.

It is difficult to look to Putin with sympathy, but this confrontation has again pushed the Russian people behind its leader, and at an unprecedented level that now stands at around 80 percent.

The Guardian has reported veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky as commenting that most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the West “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that humiliation can play in history.

It is commonly accepted that Hitler emerged from the frustrations of the German people after the heavy penalties that they had to pay the victors after the First World War. The same sense of humiliation made the war of Slobodan Milosevic against NATO popular with the Serbian population.

It is the humiliation of the Arabs divided among the winners of the First World War which is at the roots of the Caliphate, or the Islamic State, which claims that Arabs are finally going to be given back their dignity and identity.

And it is also humiliation over the imposition of austerity which is now creating a strong anti-German sentiment in Greece, to which Germans respond with a sense of righteous indignation (52 percent of Germans now want Greece to leave the Euro).

Has anyone considered who is going to take over Russia if Putin goes away? Certainly not those who are now in the opposition. Has anyone considered what it would mean to take on responsibility for a very weak state like Ukraine?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has now approved a 17.5 billion dollar relief fund for Ukraine but warned that the country’s rescue “is subject to exceptional risks, especially those arising from the conflict in the East.”

In fact Ukraine needs to plug a hole of at least 40 billion dollars in the immediate term, and economists all agree that the country does not have a viable economy. It will require many years of consistent help to reach some economic equilibrium – if there is no war.

Europe is close to recession and apparently unable even to solve the problems of Greece, but goes headlong into supporting Kiev against Russian-backed rebels. NATO can support Ukrainian soldiers up to their last man, but it is impossible that they will beat Russia. Will the West then intervene or back off and lose face, after many deaths and much waste and destruction?

A widespread view now is that sanctions should starve Russia, which will have lost its revenues from oil. What if Putin does not back down, sustained by the Russian people? Are Europeans ready to go to war to please the Republican Congress in the United States? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

The fact that in a referendum Switzerland has taken a path that goes in the opposite direction from that of Europe is an unusual fact which calls for reflection, especially because Switzerland has taken a much more progressive path, while we all were accustomed to see it as a very conservative country.

On Nov. 30, Swiss citizens were asked to vote on a proposal for reducing immigrants to a maximum of 17,000 per year, compared with 88.000 in 2013. This was rejected by 73 percent of the voters, after a unanimous campaign by the government, industrialists and trade unions that without immigrants there would be serious problems in keeping the economy expanding.

Roberto Savio

It is worth noting that foreigners account for 23.5 percent of the population in Switzerland, compared with an average of 4 percent in Europe as a whole.

Another proposal in the same referendum called for dedicating 10 percent of Swiss international cooperation to birth control in poor countries in order to reduce their birth rate. It was clearly a racist proposal, and was also defeated. Swiss citizens have no right to decide birth policies in other countries.

While the Swiss were voting, British Prime Minister David Cameron was making public his proposal to drastically restrict European immigration. Europeans would be expelled if they did not find a job within six months. They would have work continuously for four years before having access to the country’s social benefits of the country. They would also face restrictions to their right to bring their families with them, even after finding a job.“The real problem is that Europe has a dramatic lack of real statesmen or stateswomen who are ready to go against the polls for the good of their country”

The same debate is going on in Germany, where the government is also carrying out a media campaign to popularise its bill of law which also contemplates the expulsion of European immigrants who do not find a job within six months. It is obvious that this will have a cascade effect in several other European countries.

In both cases, this is an attempt to undercut anti-European parties – the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) which is on the rise in Britain and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, although the AfD is not a threat like the UKIP and what Chancellor Angela Merkel is doing amounts to an act of populism.

There is a wave of xenophobia spreading throughout Europe. Marine Le Pen’s National Front is aiming to become the number one party in France. In Italy, the right-wing Northern League is growing by the day. Today there is a xenophobic and anti-European party in every country of Europe, with the notable exception of Spain, where the People’s Party has been able to make a right-wing party redundant.

What is striking is that all those parties are creating alliances and creating a pan-European rejection of the European Union. Marine Le Pen has just chaired a meeting in Lyon of seven extreme right-wing parties, like the Flemish Vlaame Belang in Belgium and the Dutch Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders.

What was even more striking was the presence of two leaders of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Among Europe’s right-wing parties there is growing support for Putin, and a Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank with headquarters in Moscow, has just given a loan of nine million dollars to the Le Pen’s National Front.

The reality is that Europe is in serious need of young immigrants to remain competitive internationally, and innumerable studies show that immigrants have a positive impact on the economy.

In England, immigrants account for 4.3 percent of the population, their rate of employment is 78.8 percent, slightly higher than the British average (73.6 percent), and just 15 percent of immigrants request some kind of subsidy. According to a study by University College London, European immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom contributed more than 20 billion pounds to the country’s public finances between 2001 and 2011.

Similarly, all national and European studies on immigration show that immigrants request less subsidies than nationals, are net contributors in terms of taxation, and take jobs that nationals no longer want.

According to United Nations projections, Europe has a deficit of 20 million people if it wants to keep the pension system viable, but this is not simply “politically correct” at this moment. The very small minority of immigrants involved in crime is what everybody sees through strong media exposure, and the parties which are making their fortune are calling for a white and pure Europe again.

Pope Francis speaks about ethics and solidarity with immigrants, but if parties are able to ignore economics, just imagine ethics!

The Spanish National Institute of Statistics has just released its latest findings, and they are in line with similar studies everywhere in Europe. In 1976, 676,718 children were born in Spain – 18.7 babies for every 1,000 mothers. In 1995, there were 363,467 births – 9.2 babies for every 1,000 mothers.

For every 100 Spaniards of working age, 27.6 are over the age of 64 – by 2050, this figure will be closer to 73. An even more extreme figure comes from the Population Division of the United Nations. If the Spanish borders were to be closed and nobody could enter or leave, and with the growing reduction in the number of women of fertile age, by 2100 the Spanish population would stand at around 800,000 people!

We have just to look to the United States to see the opposite policy. Every year, young people bring constant expansion to the labour force and the economy. Not even the most rabid Republican speaks of abolishing immigration, just of keeping it at a lower rate.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is riding the issue of immigration due his shrinking popularity, but in the opposite direction. He wants to legalise as many illegal immigrants as possible … and there are already 52 million immigrants.

The real problem is that Europe has a dramatic lack of real statesmen or stateswomen who are ready to go against the polls for the good of their country. The best example is the powerful Angela Merkel, who has never taken any risk or any difficult decision (except on abolishing nuclear power, and that only because of the general aversion after the Japanese tsunami).

Merkel’s comment on the law on restricting European immigrants was: “Europe is not a social union”. In other words, the flow of capital is protected, the flow of workers is not.

In all this, the European Commission has been silent on immigration. And now, its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, unmoved by the revelations on how he helped hundreds of corporations to avoid taxes in Europe with deals in Luxembourg, is now presenting a development plan to which the Commission would contribute just 10 percent and the remaining 90 percent would be funded by the private sector… and that is his landmark!

Europe is clearly committing suicide and people will find out when it has already lost its position in world competition … only then, maybe, will the difference between a statesman and a politician become clear. (IPS/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 26 2014 (IPS)

After the Italian sea search-and-rescue operation Mare Nostrum at a cost of nine million euros a month, through which the Italian Navy has rescued nearly 100,000 migrants – although perhaps up to 3,000 have died – from the Mediterranean since October 2013, Europe is now presenting its new face in the Mediterranean.

The European Union is launching Joint Operation Triton with a monthly budget of 2.9 million euros and funds secured until the end of the year. Its function is to enforce border controls – not to save “boat people” – and it will patrol just thirty nautical miles from the coast, which pales in comparison with Italy’s Mare Nostrum operation which saw patrols being sent close to the Libyan coast.

Roberto Savio

Even with this very limited operation, British Prime Minister David Cameron has said that the United Kingdom will not contribute because operations that save migrants make them more willing to try to cross the Mediterranean. Of course, there is a perverted logic in this: the more migrants that die, the greater will be the discouragement for others to try.

Following this logic through, the ideal situation therefore would be to reach a death rate that would stop illegal immigration once and for all!

In this context, it is worth noting that the U.K. government is considering withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights (something that even Russian President Vladimir Putin has never considered). The argument is that nobody can be above U.K. courts.

London is also refusing to pay its share of increased of contributions to the European Union and is considering how to put an annual cap on the number of Europeans who are entitled to work legally in the United Kingdom.“Since 1986, the year of signing of the Single European Act, Europeans have never been able to agree on a minimum social basis, which would have given them rights as workers to act collectively as Europeans in the face of a market which is economically unified, but with no common social legislation”

And finally, the U.K. government received with great uproar the sentence of the European Court of Justice, which placed a European cap on banker bonuses, rejecting Britain’s claims that it was illegal. The British argument was that pay levels (also of discredited bankers) were part of social policy and thus under the authority of member states not of the European Union.

Meanwhile, the same Court has issued another sentence under which E.U. member states are not obliged to support European citizens who do not have economic activities in the E.U. countries to which they have migrated. And the German Parliament is now preparing a law to expel European immigrants who do not find a job within six months.

Of course, this will open the doors to all other countries to reduce the free movement of Europeans in Europe, a cornerstone of the original vision of a solidary Europe. Now Europeans will be obliged to take any job, and therefore the law of market will become the primary criterion for their movements in Europe.

Since 1986, the year of signing of the Single European Act, Europeans have never been able to agree on a minimum social basis, which would have given them rights as workers to act collectively as Europeans in the face of a market which is economically unified, but with no common social legislation.

In fact, the point has now been reached where social criteria are the last to be used to judge whether a country is recovering or not, well after economic and financial criteria.

A devastated Greece is now again being considered in financial markets because its economic indicators are on the up. And, at the last G20 meeting in Brisbane, Spain was touted as the example that austerity policies – those indicated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the example for laggards like Italy and France – are the correct way out of the crisis.

At the same time, a very different source, Caritas, has reported that only 34.3 percent of Spaniards live a normal life, while 40.6 percent are stuck in precariousness, 24.2 percent are already suffering moderate exclusion and 10.9 percent are living in severe exclusion.

To understand the trend, six years ago, 50.2 percent of Spaniards had a normal life. Now, one citizen in four is suffering exclusion, and of those 11 million excluded citizens, 77.1 percent have no job, 61.7 percent no house and 46 percent no health care support.

According to UNICEF’s recent report on children under recession, 76.5 million children in the rich countries live in poverty, and in Spain, 36.3 percent of the country’s children (2.7 million) are living in a state of precariousness.

What is now new is that some major financial institutions have started to draw attention to social issues.

Janet L. Yellen, chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has declared that she is concerned about the growing inequality of wealth and income in the United States, and that chances for people to advance economically appear to be diminishing. And Mario Draghi, governor of the European Central Bank, is now constantly mentioning the issues of “unbearable unemployment “and “growing exclusion”.

In the background there is the proven fact that countries which took emergency measures to reduce public borrowing have mostly had weaker growth, like most European countries (with the exception of Germany, helped by a boom in machinery exports to Russia and China), while those which introduced a policy of stimulus, like the United States, Japan and Britain, have done much better, also in reducing unemployment.

But Merkel continues to ignore calls from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and other monetary institutions – she is only interested in pleasing her constituency, which is increasingly looking to its immediate interests and losing sight of European perspectives.

In all this, the banks continue to be uninterested in any social perspective. A few days ago, European and U.S. regulators imposed new fines worth 4.5 billion dollars on a number of major banks (we are now approaching the 200 billion dollar mark since the crisis started in 2008) for illegal activities.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the largest of them, JP Morgan, declared in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC that it is important that United States creates a “safe harbour” where JPMorgan’s illegal practice of hiring the relatives of political leaders “is not punished”.

In Dimon’s country, between 2009 and 2010, 93 percent of economic growth ended up in the pockets of one percent of the population, according to Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the 16,000 families with wealth of at least 111 million dollars have seen their share of national wealth double since 2012 to 11.2 percent.

The last U.S. presidential elections cost 3.4 billion dollars, and most of that came from this small minority. Democracy, where all votes are equal, is increasingly becoming a plutocracy where money elects.

Meeting leaders of social movements on Oct. 26, Pope Francis told them: “They call me a communist [for speaking of] land, work and housing … but love for the poor is at the centre of the Gospel.” Certainly, governments are doing otherwise …

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Joaquín Roy
BARCELONA, Sep 11 2014 (IPS)

At last, after the obligatory summer break, the European Union (EU) has some new faces to fill the top vacancies on the team that began to emerge from the May 25 parliamentary elections.

Before the recess, conservative Luxembourger Jean-Claude Juncker had been appointed to the presidency of the European Commission, the executive body of the 28-nation bloc.

Joaquín Roy

There was stiff opposition from some governments, particularly from British Prime Minister David Cameron, but in the spirit of the Treaty of Lisbon the post was offered to the candidate of the political group winning most seats in the new European Parliament, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).

The second agreement was to leave German socialist Martin Schultz in his present post as president of the Parliament for another two and a half years. A balance was thereby struck between moderates of the right and of the left.

The thorniest issues remained to be faced. The traditional “Carolingian” (Franco-German) Europe was still in control of the bloc, and renewal was needed. Eastern Europe was demanding a larger role and there was a notable absence of women.

Juncker had already made it known that he would not accept a new Commission that did not have at least one-third women members. The established order, an unabashedly male-dominated club, gave no signs of correcting itself. The EU’s customary intricate balancing act was set in motion.“Renzi wanted to attack head-on Italy’s poor track record in European affairs in recent years, tarnished by the deplorable presence of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in power and in opposition, a handicap that affected his predecessor Enrico Letta before him”

The jigsaw pieces began to fall into place. Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s candidacy fell out of favour. Then followed a dual move by the community. First, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a conservative from the entourage of former president Lech Walesa, was appointed president of the EU Council, made up of its heads of state and government.

Secondly, Federica Mogherini, the Italian foreign minister, was catapulted to the position of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (FASP).

Proposing her candidacy, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi doggedly fought resistance from representatives of the Baltic states who regarded her as too soft on Russia, citing the example of her invitation to President Vladimir Putin to a meeting in July.

The sweetener of Tusk’s designation mollified the resistance of Eastern European countries, but not the reluctance of other nations that regarded the inexperienced Mogherini, just 41 in June, as not strong enough to face external enemies in a convulsed world.

However, Renzi, himself only 39, was playing a risky juggling act with several balls in the air. Mogherini was his message to the power clique in Rome to try to end the illusion that political respect requires having reached an age of around 100.

Moreover, Renzi wanted to attack head-on Italy’s poor track record in European affairs in recent years, tarnished by the deplorable presence of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in power and in opposition, a handicap that affected his predecessor Enrico Letta before him.

Furthermore, Renzi wanted to create an opportunity to influence European Union foreign policy through Mogherini’s cooperation.

Renzi’s bold proposal may backfire on him, precisely because of the weakness of the Italian system, which is tolerating leadership by a moderate Socialist so long as he does not shake its foundations.

Within the European community, Renzi will have to rely on the support of his Socialist counterparts, who have been going through a bad patch recently. They have suffered from the crisis, which has forced them to apply neoliberal austerity policies, causing heads to roll from Scandinavia to Portugal and Greece.

For her part, Mogherini will have to face traditional problems and new challenges. The establishment already mistrusts her because of her age. She will find little support from a group of people, most of whom could be her parents.

On the Commission, where she is vice president, she will hardly be comforted by the handful of women Juncker manages to recruit. On the Council she will have the support of only four ladies, led by Angela Merkel, in a boardroom full of boring men in dark suits and dreadful ties, each of them obsessed with managing foreign policy on their own terms and at their own risk.

The worst of the bad omens for the appointment is the suspicion that the EU’s hard core does not believe the position of High Representative to be important, given that the main security and defence competences remain in the national domains.

Mogherini’s second challenge, like that of her predecessor Catherine Ashton of the United Kingdom, is to cope with the enduring imprint of the founder of the position, Javier Solana of Spain.

However, her ambition and track record already surpass those of the eminently forgettable Ashton, a Brussels official who had already booked her ticket on the Eurostar train under the Channel back to London when she was unexpectedly appointed to FASP.

Mogherini can document her solid preparation for such a high-profile job over two decades, with her degree in Political Science, her exchange experience on an Erasmus scholarship in the French city of Aix-en-Provence, and her thesis on political Islam.

A mother of two with a gentle smile and light-coloured eyes, she gives the impression of an assistant professor working up the academic ladder towards a full professorship. But she could surprise some of the detractors who are already prophesying her failure.

She is a professional in a field that needs new vocations and fresh vision. She will lead the most impressive diplomatic team on the planet, made up of the ministries of 28 countries and the European External Action Service. She deserves good luck, not just for herself and Renzi, but for all Europeans and people beyond. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

The British government has published internal legal advice which it said showed it was legally entitled to take military action against Syria, even if the United Nations Security Council blocked such action.

It also published intelligence material on Thursday on last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, saying there was no doubt that such an attack had taken place.

The document is the latest sign that a coalition of Western countries, including the United States, France and the UK, are moving towards military action against Syria after the alleged attack. It was “highly likely” that the Syrian government was behind the attack, the document said.

“If action in the Security Council is blocked, the UK would still be permitted under international law to take exceptional measures in order to alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe in Syria,” a copy of the British government’s legal position read.

In such circumstances, it added that “military intervention to strike specific targets with the aim of deterring and disrupting further such attacks would be necessary and proportionate and therefore legally justifiable”.

In a debate on Thursday, however, Prime Minister David Cameron told the British parliament it was “unthinkable” that Britain would launch military action against Syria if there was strong opposition at the Security Council.

“It would be unthinkable to proceed if there was overwhelming opposition in the Security Council,” he said.

Syria defiant

Earlier on Thursday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that his country would defend itself against any foreign military intervention.

“Syria will defend itself in the face of any aggression, and threats will only increase its commitment to its principles and its independence,” the embattled Syrian leader told a visiting delegation of Yemeni politicians, according to state media.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that the United States had “concluded” that the Syrian government had carried out a chemical attack. Obama advocated the use of a “tailored, limited” military strike in response.

He was referring to an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Damascus Eastern Ghouta suburbs last week that aid agencies say killed at least 355 people, and injured as many as 3,000 others.

“We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out,” Obama said in the televised interview. But he did not present any direct evidence to back up his assertion, and the government has strongly denied accusations that it was involved.

‘Destabilisation’

Arguing for measured intervention after long resisting deeper involvement in Syria, Obama insisted that while Assad’s government must be punished, he intended to avoid repeating the errors made in the 2003 Iraq war.

The most likely option, U.S. officials say, would be to launch cruise missiles from U.S. ships in the Mediterranean in a campaign that would last several days.

New hurdles have, however, emerged that appear to have slowed the formation of an international coalition that could use military force to hit Syria.

On Wednesday, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council failed to reach an agreement on a draft resolution from the British seeking authorisation for the use of force.

Russia objected to international intervention, after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier rejected the case for ascribing culpability to the Syrian government at this time, adding that foreign military intervention would lead to “destabilisation of […] the country and the region”.

Chinese state media on Thursday said that any military intervention “would have dire consequences for regional security and violate the norms governing international relations”.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

"Indignados" in Málaga, Spain, protest cuts in health and education. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jul 8 2013 (IPS)

At the last summit of European heads of state held in Brussels at the end of June, the main theme was youth unemployment, which has now reached 23 percent of European youth (although it stands at 41 percent in Spain).

Last year, the International Labour Organisation issued a dramatic report on Global Employment Trends for Youth 2012 in which it spoke of a “lost generation”.

According to projections, the generation currently seeking to enter the market place will retire with a pension of just 480 euros – if it actually succeeds in entering the market – because of temporary jobs without social contributions.

After long discussions, Europe’s leaders decided to allocate six billion dollars to fight youth unemployment. After much shorter discussions, they decided to allocate up to 60 billion dollars to support Europe’s banks. This, on top of the striking subsidies already received: the European Central Bank alone has given 1,000 billion dollars to the banks at nominal cost.

All the efforts to create a European banking system under a central regulator are now on hold until the German elections in September. As a member of the German delegation at the June summit is reported to have said: ”We know well what we are supposed to do, to calm financial markets. But we are not elected by financial markets, we are elected by German citizens.” (IHT, Jun. 28, 2013).

And of course, no effort has been made to explain to Germany’s citizens why it is in their interest to show economic solidarity with the most fragile countries of Europe. Democracy, as it is understood today, is based on leaders who follow popular feelings, not on leaders who feel it their duty to push their electors towards a world of vision and challenges.

The summit was also obliged to accept the blackmail of British Prime Minister David Cameron: either you maintain the subsidies that then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher obtained in 1973, when you insisted that we join Europe (which makes Britain a net recipient of European money), or we will block the European budget.

This is because the anti-Europe electorate in Britain is growing and Cameron could not afford to appear weak. But Cameron was one of the strongest proponents of the subsidy for the banks, and no wonder: the financial system now accounts for 10 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product (GDP).

It is a very curious situation, in which Europe has not only spent several hundred billion dollars on its banks, it has even invited the International Monetary Fund (whose controlling member is the U.S.) to join the European institutions and manage the European crisis.

And, in an unprecedented sign of independence from the U.S., Europe has rejected American calls for reducing austerity and starting policies of growth as Washington and Tokyo have been doing, so far with proven success.

Nevertheless, what is common to the three most powerful players in the West (U.S., Europe and Japan) has been their inability – and unwillingness – to place banks under control and react to their string of crimes.

Central bankers from the entire world join in the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) based in Basel. Now its Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has come up with a proposal that would tighten the relationship between the capital of the banks and the volume of financial operations they can afford. The proposal establishes that banks must maintain high-quality capital, like stock or retained earnings, equal to seven percent of their loans and assets, and that the biggest banks may be required to hold more than nine percent.

This is not exactly a revolutionary proposal, and has been criticised as insufficient by many analysts and regulators. This is confirmed by the fact that the U.S. Federal Reserve estimates that between 90 and 95 percent of banks with assets of less than 10 billion dollars already respect such parameters. Well, even this bland proposal has been received with a howl of protest from many banks, claiming that they would have great difficulty in raising capital.

Under the old capitalist economy, no enterprise would run without capital adequate to its need. Today we have a new branch of the economy, which wants to play without capital, and expects the state to bail it out if anything goes wrong. So, let us just look briefly at how many times things went wrong without anybody ever going to jail:

On Apr. 28, 2002, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), won a lawsuit ordering 10 banks to pay 1.4 billion dollars in compensation and fines because of fraudulent activities. One year later, the SEC discovered that 13 out of 15 financial institutions randomly investigated were guilty of fraud. In 2010, Goldman Sachs agreed to a fine of 550 million dollars to avoid a trial for fraud.

In July last year, the U.S. Senate presented a 335-page report on the British bank HSBC. Over the years it helped drug dealers and criminals recycle illicit money. The fine was 1.9 billion dollars.

In November 2012, SAC Capital was fined 600 million dollars, and in the same month the second leading British bank, Standard Chartered, was fined 667 million dollars.

In February this year, Barclays Bank announced that it had set aside 1.165 billion euros to face fines for “illicit transactions”.

And in March this year, Citigroup accepted a fine of 730 million dollars for “selling investments based on junk to unsuspecting clients”.

We all know that the crisis in which we find ourselves (which, for the optimists, will end in 2020 and for the pessimists in 2025) originated in the U.S., caused by the 10 largest banks’ decision to sell derivatives based on junk and certified by the Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s rating agencies. U.S. taxpayers “donated” 750,000 million dollars to the banks, while the British did the same for HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank and Northern Rock.

While this financial disaster was happening, the ‘Big Five’ (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Bearn Sterns) paid their executives three billion dollars between 2003 and 2007, And, in 2008, they received 20 billion dollars in bonuses while their banks were losing 42 billion dollars.

All of this was certified by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, which control 75 percent of the world market. Now Standard & Poor’s has been requested to pay 500 million dollars.

But what about the millions of people who have lost their jobs? The millions of young people who see no future in their lives? It’s the old story: if you steal bread, you go to jail, but if you steal millions, nothing will happen to you … and if you steal millions in a bank, even less reason to worry.

Meanwhile, back at the summit table, the priority for survival is to allocate taxpayers’ money to banks, even if all talk is about youth unemployment.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

The United States is being singled out for criticism after the Group of Eight (G8) rich countries failed to adopt a plan pushed by British Prime Minister David Cameron to require the creation of public country-level registries with detailed information on corporate ownership and activity.

Although the United States did unveil important new pledges Tuesday to crack down on anonymous “shell” corporations, used by money launderers and tax evaders, critics point out that Washington has not outlined how it will implement these commitments. They also warn that the commitments will not put corporate ownership information into the public domain, a criticism also levelled at the G8 declaration overall.

The G8 met Monday and Tuesday at a summit in Northern Ireland, during which tax evasion and corporate transparency were given top billing. While Cameron had hoped other countries would back his call for the creation of public registries, none did so.

Even as the G8 countries decided on a more incremental approach to financial transparency than some had hoped, however, they did arrive at a host of important agreements, including for countries to begin sharing tax information."We would like to see even greater moves for corporate transparency."
-- Eric LeCompte

“The G8’s declaration is absolutely historic,” Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA Network, a religious antipoverty group, said Tuesday. “We would like to see even greater moves for corporate transparency, but the foundation the G8 built will take us into a more accountable corporate world then we’ve seen before.”

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the Washington-based multilateral lender, similarly issued congratulations, noting, “International tax avoidance and evasion have emerged as major risks to government revenue and as threats to the credibility of tax systems in the eyes of citizens – in both advanced and developing countries.”

Others are offering more tempered reactions, however, particularly over the failure of the G8 to explicitly call for the creation of public registries detailing the “beneficial” (or final) ownership of all companies, including shell corporations.

While the United States has now said it will be creating these registries on its own, these will apparently be available only to law enforcement and tax authorities. Critics urge these databases to be made open to the public from the beginning.

“It is important that the United States has committed to creating registries of beneficial information, because this does go beyond the G8 declaration,” Stefanie Ostfeld, a senior policy advisor with Global Witness, an advocacy group and member of the Financial Transparency Coalition, told IPS.

“But it’s not putting that information in the public domain, as the United Kingdom is saying it will do. Without such a commitment, these moves will not live up to their potential impact.”

Shell companies

“We’re very pleased to see the G8 as a whole recognise that anonymous shell companies around the world are a massive problem,” Heather Lowe, legal counsel and director of government affairs at Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington watchdog group, told IPS.

“But then it comes down to the individual national action plans to achieve meaningful progress. In this, the United States is particularly significant in part because of the very high number of companies created here in the first place.”

In recent years, the United States has increasingly spoken out on international tax evasion and money laundering, with a domestic political debate progressing on related reforms to the tax code. At the same time, the United States is widely thought to shelter a huge number of these shell corporations, used to launder corrupt earnings or hide income of foreign citizens.

“It’s very hard to tell how many of these shell companies are incorporated here, as the U.S. doesn’t require information on the ultimate beneficial controller of each company,” Lowe said.

“However, we do know that the potential for a large number of anonymous corporations existing under U.S. law is very high. We also know that those who want to create such a company know this is a good place to do it.”

U.S. shell companies are estimated to have facilitated some 18 billion dollars in illicit transactions in 2005 alone, according to the Treasury Department. Advocates say this legal laxity is directly affecting developing economies, allowing corrupt officials or cronies in resource-rich countries to siphon billions of dollars out of their countries.

According to a recent report by GFI, such abuse could be resulting in losses for developing countries as high as a trillion dollars a year – 10 times the amount those countries receive annually in foreign aid.

For this reason, activists had increased pressure substantially in recent months on President Obama, calling on him to back Cameron’s plan to create a public registry on corporate ownership.

Yet the final pledge fell short of this goal. In a fact sheet released Tuesday, the White House said simply that “The Treasury Department, along with other federal agencies, will continue to advocate for comprehensive legislation on beneficial ownership.”

Recommitment

Simply pushing for such legislation is in line with a commitment the Obama administration made nearly two years ago. According to Lowe, little progress has been made since then.

“While this is a step forward, it’s certainly not a change in U.S. government policy,” she said.

“This [G8 announcement] is really just a recommitment to the issue. That’s fine, but what we really wanted to see was a plan for how the government would advocate for new legislation, which we haven’t been able to obtain.”

In the past, U.S. legislation to require the collection of “beneficial ownership” information has been difficult to advance. One proposal has been introduced (and rejected) in the Senate at least three times over the past decade, at one point being co-sponsored by then-Senator Obama.

On Tuesday, Senator Carl Levin, a primary sponsor of a bill that would require such disclosure, lauded the new G8 commitments: “I said before the summit that the G8 nations were poised to strike a hammer blow against offshore corporate tax avoidance. The G8 commitments made today, if carried out, can bring that hammer down.”

Levin’s legislation, as well as a similar bill in the House of Representatives, is expected to be reintroduced in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, it is currently unclear whether regulatory or executive action on this issue could allow the administration to work around Congress, but advocates suggest they see some opportunities for doing so.

Camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) in northern Pakistan are breeding grounds for malnutrition. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

Between 2010 and 2012, 868 million people worldwide were deemed hungry by a conservative definition. This figure represents only a small fraction of the world’s population whose health and lives are blighted by malnutrition.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, assistant director-general for economic and social development at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Credit: @FAO/Giulio Napolitano

Currently, malnutrition is believed to be the underlying cause of death for 2.6 million children annually. Meanwhile, two billion people lack adequate micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – that are essential for their mental and physical development.

A quarter of the children in the world, and a third in developing countries, are stunted because they do not get the right nutrients. Four in five of these malnourished children are in just 20 countries, including almost half of Indian children under five.

In Nigeria, over half of the poorest children are stunted, while in China, children in poor rural counties are six times more likely to be stunted than urban children. In Indonesia, a sharp rise in wasting – or acute malnutrition – in the wake of recent food crises has hit children from the poorest households hardest.

Receiving the right nutrients in the first years of life is not only a matter of life and death, but also a major determinant of future life chances – potentially raising future earnings by a fifth. Today, about 170 million children under five are stunted because they do not get the right nutrients, while their cognitive and physical development is impaired.

Some progress has been made in reducing hunger over the past two decades. With a strong final push, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) objective of halving the prevalence of hunger by 2015 is within reach. Already, 51 countries have achieved the target, or are on track to do so.

With modest progress over the past two decades, the share of stunted children declined from 40 percent in 1990 to 27 percent in 2010. And if present trends continue, half a billion more children will be stunted in the next 15 years.

Meanwhile, around one and a half billion people are overweight, with half a billion deemed obese, and hence, more vulnerable to serious non-communicable diseases. Malnutrition could cost as much as five percent of global income – 3.5 trillion dollars, or 500 dollars per person – in terms of lost productivity and health care expenses.

What should we do to eradicate malnutrition? The 2013 report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisaion (FAO), ‘The State of Food and Agriculture: Food systems for better nutrition’, shows the way forward. Good nutrition must start with food production. Improved food systems must make nutritious foods affordable.

Overcoming malnutrition – caloric undernourishment, micronutrient deficiencies, obesity – requires appropriate interventions in food systems, public health, education and social protection. Tackling malnutrition is a complex task requiring strong political commitment, leadership at the highest levels, and unprecedented cooperation and coordination among various ministries and partners.

Better organised food systems are key to more diversified and healthier diets. Policy must ensure that all people have informed access to a wide range of nutritious foods to make healthy choices. Consumers need help making better dietary choices for improved nutrition with regulation, education, information and other interventions.

Food systems must become more sensitive to the special needs of mothers and young children. Malnutrition during the critical first 1,000 days from conception can cause permanent physical and cognitive impairment in children and lasting damage to the mothers’ health.

Food security and nutrition are now at the apex of the international development agenda. In June 2012, the United Nations Secretary General made the call to set the ambitious but feasible goal of zero hunger. The Zero Hunger Challenge calls for a world without hunger, no more stunting, minimal food waste and losses, sustainable agriculture and doubling poor farmers’ incomes.

On Jun. 8, the governments of Brazil and the United Kingdom will co-host a high-level pre-G8 meeting entitled ‘Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science’ in London. UK Prime Minister David Cameron intends to follow up by sponsoring a high-level global panel on agriculture and food systems for nutrition.

On Nov. 19-21, 2014, the FAO, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and others in the U.N. system will co-organise the inter-governmental International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), 22 years after the first one in 1992, to establish the bases for sustained international cooperation and policy coordination to overcome malnutrition. The preparatory technical meeting on Nov. 13-15 this year will establish the evidence base for this purpose.

Malnutrition’s time has come. By cooperating effectively, we have a real chance of ending this blight on humanity within a generation.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar
MOGADISHU, Feb 23 2012 (IPS)

With an international meeting aimed at resolving the political crisis in Somalia set to take place Thursday, the local media in this East African nation is awash with scepticism, referring to the efforts as a new system of re-colonising the country.

The country has been without an effective government since 1991. The meeting, hosted by British Prime Minister David Cameron, will have representatives from global organsiations and over 40 governments, including Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Britain has also invited representatives of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), as well as the presidents of the breakaway Somaliland, Puntland, and Galmudug, and the non-militant Islamist group Ahlu Sunnah Waljama’a (ASWJ).

But one of the country’s most influential political leaders and future presidential candidate, Omar Abdirahman Mohamed, told IPS said that Britain wanted Somalia to have a “weak administration”.

“The U.K. doesn’t want Somalia to have its military reformed and it was the sole superpower that negated the lifting of the arms embargo on Somalia. This shows that the U.K. government is totally against the formation of a stable government and powerful military in Somalia,” said Mohamed, who heads the Mogadishu-based Midnimo Political Party.

In 2008 U.K. law implemented various statutory instruments to enforce the arms embargo on Somalia. The embargo was first implemented on the country by the United Nations in 1992 after civil war broke out. It was partially lifted in 2007 to allow the importation of arms by the African Union Mission in Somalia.

“All Somalis are carefully watching the London conference and its outcome. Let the conference not be a conspiracy against the sovereignty of Somalia,” Mohamed said.

An alleged “leaked” communiqué, apparently written for release after the talks, has been circulating here, fuelling speculation in this East African nation about the negative outcome of these talks.

One controversial point on the document, which is available online, refers to allegedly passing on the functions of government to a caretaker authority until the constitutional discussions are concluded. However, the point further explains that the country’s constitution must be endorsed through a referendum or elected parliament.

The radio station Voice of the Peace said in its editorials that the U.K. was not looking for a lasting solution for Somalia.

Most newspapers including Kulmiye News and Xog-ogaal highlighted stories of locals who were concerned over Somalia becoming a colony once more.

One well-known elder, Ahmed Diriye, told local Radio Daljir he did not believe that the London conference would have positive results for Somalia. “We know that Kenya (does not have a) powerful military and that was (because of the) U.K., and I am afraid that it wants Somalia to have only a police force,” Diriye said.

The country’s President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed denied this saying media reports were “rumours and baseless propaganda” intended to mislead the views of Somalis.

Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed (c) said that the international community was committed to putting an end to the lawlessness in the country. Credit: Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar/IPS

“There is no cause for concern over the sovereignty of the country. I can assure the Somali people that the London conference will focus on the interest of Somalia and how the world community can help the country out of its long-existing hardships,” Ahmed said Friday.

He was speaking in Garowe, a town in the breakaway state of Puntland, where the Somali government, regional autonomies, civil society, and ASWJ met to sign a deal outlining the composition of the country’s new parliament when the transitional period ends this August.

Ahmed said that the international community was committed to putting an end to the lawlessness in Somalia.

The British Ambassador to Somalia Matt Baugh told IPS from his Nairobi office that the conference is aimed at delivering a new international approach to Somalia and would form the basis for coordinated and sustained international leadership.

He added said that while the five-hour conference would not solve all the problems in Somalia, Britain wanted it to be “the catalyst for more international engagement in Somalia and more effective Somali leadership.”

He denied local media reports that the London conference will pave the way for a colony in Somalia and said that the British government and the international community wanted to help Somalia emerge from its problems.

“There are no options for colonising Somalia,” the ambassador insisted.

“We are holding this conference now because enough is enough. The suffering during the famine was a wake up call for the international community.  It’s time to arrest Somalia’s relentless decline – and make the most of the opportunities in front of us. We have an opportunity to support a more inclusive and representative political process when the transitional period ends in August,” he said.

However, the extremist group Al-Shabaab, which recently announced a merger with international terrorist group Al-Qaeda, denounced the conference saying that it intends to destroy the existence of Islam in Somalia.

“The U.K. has already colonised many Muslim countries and it wants to have colonies in Somalia again. Christian governments and their puppets are meeting there in London and they will tell the so-called TFG something to implement in the country, but that will not really work,” Al-Shabaab’s main preacher, Sheik Fu’ad Mohamed Qalaf, told the group’s radio station on Tuesday.

Many Somalis are hopeful that the conference will bring lasting peace to their country.

“The path of reconciliation, forgiveness and tolerance is needed so the wounds of your homeland may be healed and the plight of your people may come to an end,” the Imam of Somalia’s Al-Azhar Mosque, Dr. Sheik Ahmed El Tayyeb, said of the conference.

His comments helped some change their negative views of the talks.

“The Imam knows more than we do, so from now on I am very hopeful of the London conference and I am calling all Somalis to help the government implement the conference outcomes on the ground,” Abdi Abdulle Ahmed, a former schoolteacher, told IPS.

Meanwhile, other locals have high expectations of the conference. Well-known Somali folklore dancer Ahmed Abokar Abuna said he hopes that it will bring stability to the country.

“I believe the world is now struggling to solve Somalia’s problems so that Somalis and the whole world will be rescued from the danger of terrorists who have bases in Somalia,” he told IPS while walking along the Via Liberia Road in Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab control large parts of southern Somalia and until last year controlled large portions of the country’s capital.

Sahro Moalim, a 22-year-old university student in Mogadishu, said that she had never experienced peace in Somalia and she hoped it would be an outcome of the conference.

Eyni Ahmed, a political analyst and the chairwomen of Somali Youth League, a group that aided with the disarmament of hundreds of former Al-Shabaab child soldiers, told IPS that the situation on the ground in Somalia is currently dangerous and the conference needed to find a resolution for the political turmoil.

“If it continues like this, if lawlessness and killings continue, it will have a bad impact on the country’s existence … so there will come a time when the world will say: ‘There was a country called Somalia once upon time,’” Eyni told IPS.

(END/2012)